Time management and event scheduling applications have become integral parts of the lives of many people. People use calendar applications to help them manage business schedules and daily activities, such as for making appointments for various types of meetings. Electronic calendar applications, such as Lotus Notes®, Microsoft Outlook®, Mozilla® Sunbird™, and other types of calendaring and e-mail suites or programs provide capabilities for scheduling meetings.
People, such as managers and team leaders, use calendar applications or time management applications to schedule meetings with their respective employees or team members. A person may use the calendar application to schedule a meeting time and send invitations for the meeting to prospective attendees. Each attendee invited to the meeting may accept, decline, or ignore the invitation. The calendar applications may notify the person scheduling the meeting which attendees have accepted, declined, and ignored the invitations. The calendar applications may update or make appropriate entries, or reservations, in the calendars of the attendees or invitees which have accepted the invitations to attend the meeting.
One drawback of existing calendar applications is they generally do not have any automatic follow-up or auditing capabilities. The existing calendar and time management applications do not allow for automatic confirmation of attendance by invitees or prospective attendees. For example, a meeting coordinator may use a calendaring application to schedule a meeting and send out meeting invitations. Unfortunately, many of the prospective attendees to the meeting may accept the meeting invitations and plan to attend but have conflicts arise which prevent them from attending the meeting. If the meeting coordinator does not follow-up with the prospective attendees, such as by calling or sending an e-mail reminder, he or she may be surprised to find that many of the prospective attendees have changed their schedules and will not attend. Additionally, with poor attendance, the purpose or objective of holding the meeting may become moot due to the poor attendance. For example, the purpose of the meeting may be to give a series of presentations to a general manager. If the general manager cannot attend the meeting, the goal of the meeting is rendered unachievable.